Dear Edgycat fans, In February of last year I ran away from Chicago. It was just too cold. I felt trapped in the house. My cat, Sally Cookie, felt that way too. Sally could not be left behind. She was ill, an illness with unpleasant symptoms. I couldn't ask anyone else to take care of her so I decided to take her with me to Berkeley, California. Here is our story...

5) Blinded By Oxytocin

Now I don’t feel so odd about how attached I am to Sally. It’s the Oxytocin, the hormone that causes social bonding that accounts for my closeness to Sally.

Before this week I’d never seen the word and if I had I might has thought that it was the name of the drug that almost brought Rush Limbaugh down, but it’s something nicer, the hormone that’s released when we pet an animal, released between mother and child, man and woman, man and cat. It’s what makes it not discretionary, but mandatory to pay huge vet bills, what made it necessary to drag my decrepit cat with me to California.

There’s been a sea change in the way animal lovers are viewed by psychologists. It used to be thought that if you had a pet or two that signaled a defect in your human relationships... you were too damaged for human love. A new study assures us that many people who have wholesome relationships with people also love their pets. Whew! Now when my dear cousin talks in a loud voice on the bus of his latest adventures with Mulberry and Larkin I don’t have to try to pretend I’m not with him. I know that he is blinded by oxycotin. And I imagine there are a few others like us on this bus.

I was looking for a way to explain to my friends why I had dragged myself to Northern California in the rainy season when I thought of beauty. Berkeley is beautiful, full of lush flowers, trees in bloom. I bought a cardboard camera and started to take photos. I like that Berkeley is shabby, that houses can stand years of neglect looking awful and be surrounded by so much unkempt beauty. I saw a fence made of Meyers lemons. I stopped to take a photo. There was a handwritten sign attached to a makeshift fence, "Don’t steal my lemons...” I looked up to see a harridan about my age closing in on me. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “Is it not okay to take a picture of your lemons,” I asked. “Just don’t steal them," she snarled. I promised I would control myself and she went back into the house.

Join us for next week's final entry, "Sally and I Fly Home."